Press
2006 – Present
Halim’s work at the intersection of AI and litterature was covered by the SF Standard: “There are some artists like Halim Madi who argue for AI’s ability to stretch our creative muscles past existing cultural or internal limitations. A San Francisco-based poet, Madi sometimes plugs his verses into the program to see what it predicts that he will come up with and uses that as a road map to go in a different, more surprising, direction. With the continual scroll of text that is generated by AI platforms, he imagines writers and poets using the technology to become more like sculptors, shaving off words to reveal a poetic truth. “When you have these very powerful engines that are, in a way, relentless, it somehow awakens a part of us that we didn’t know existed,” Madi said. The feeling is not totally unrelated to the psychedelic experience, which can create a fresh layer of powdered snow on the well-worn ski tracks that make up our typical thought patterns. Madi’s new book of poetry, Invasions, is a collection of his efforts to strike back by replying to robotexts with his own poetry. His next step is using that volume of data to train an artificial intelligence model to reply to spam texters using his own voice. “It’s the ultimate subversion. Now I’m using artificial intelligence to answer robots,” Madi said. “It feels like insanity, but there’s also something about it that makes me laugh, and that means there’s potential.”
Border Bodies was covered by Counterpulse: “A zajal-infused theatrical journey by Halim and Jess, unfolding in three chapters that traverse the landscapes of Lebanese village life, migration, and cultural hybridization. This immersive play intertwines narratives of identity, tradition, and modernity, using a dynamic ribbon as a central motif to represent the fluidity of borders. It challenges and redefines concepts of purity and arrival, wondering about cultural fusion and the evolution of identity as a form of weaving rather than bridging, engaging audiences in an interactive, somatic re-narrativization of migration and Lebanese culture specifically and Arab culture more generally.”
Deserve it was covered by SF Gate: “A line formed all night as guests waited to experience Halim Madi’s interactive work, tucked in a corner of the venue, which required viewers to sit behind a computer and fill out a minefield of an immigration application. It scrambled their responses as the artist looked on, portraying a numb cog in a broken bureaucratic machine. Onlookers shared their own immigration experiences, with one woman muttering under her breath: It’s actually just like that”.
Redeclarations was covered by the Santa Barbara Independent in Reframing History with ‘Redeclarations’ by Santa Barbara-Based Artist Halim Madi as well as by the compulsive reader.
Flight of the Jaguar was reviewed by James Gaynor.
Ricochets, my first poetry book, written in French, was covered by my school journal.
My first technology company, Birdback was covered by TechCrunch, Startup beat and FinSMEs. My second technology company, Invisible, was covered by Forbes. My work on Avatars at Meta, the redesign of Facebook Profiles, the revamping of 3D navigation in Oculus Virtual Reality and the accomplishments of the Design Systems and Dashboard teams at Stripe were covered mostly by TechCrunch.